


We Can't Take Souvenirs Home With Us

by nerdelation8



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bertholdt Hoover is a Good Guy, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Comedy, F/M, Female OC is meant to be the reader, Horror, Reiner and Bert are Best Friends, Romance, So her appearance is not really described, Titan Shifters, Titan Shifting, Titans, Transformation, Written before I read the post-s3 manga, Zeke is a Jerk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 17:30:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20531837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdelation8/pseuds/nerdelation8
Summary: Note: SPOILERS for Season 3 Part 2 of the anime and minor spoilers about the Cart Titan but that's it.  (This was written before I caught up on the manga.)This is a follow-up to "Escaping the Jaws of Defeat."  Bertholdt avoided a grisly end back in Shiganshina.  Now, he and the girl who saved him from the Survey Corps finally arrive at the outskirts of the island to meet up with Zeke, Reiner, and the Cart Titan.  Bertholdt wants to take the girl back with them to Marley.  Zeke, however, has other plans.





	We Can't Take Souvenirs Home With Us

Reiner, Zeke, and Pieck had just finished eating the breakfast Reiner had cooked by the campfire when the Colossal Titan appeared. A girl from the Survey Corps was riding along inside its mouth.

After the two survivors had exited the Titan, Reiner kindly offered bacon and eggs to them. They ate ravenously, especially the girl. 

Now, all the pans and plates were empty but Zeke’s. 

Their two visitors had just finished explaining how they had survived the battle. Reiner was amazed. The girl had saved Bertholdt from being eaten, and through dumb luck, both of them had made it out of Shiganshina alive.

The Cart Titan watched from the corner.

“If the Survey Corps had entered that house where we were hiding, we’d be done for,” the girl said.

Bertholdt smiled at her. He was glad that everything had turned out alright.

The Warriors’ long-haired captain finished off his cup of black coffee, then spoke.

“It’s a touching story, Bertholdt. I am pleased the Colossal Titan didn’t fall into enemy hands. But unfortunately, we can’t take souvenirs home with us.”

Zeke put the last strip of bacon into his mouth, crunching off half of it. 

The girl’s blood ran cold. 

Bertholdt blinked. “Wait, _what?”_

“She may seem nice, and I appreciate her efforts to help you, but she’s an Eldian devil like all the others.”

“Excuse me?!” the girl interjected.

The captain spoke coolly. “I’ll prove it to you.”

Reiner and Bertholdt were shocked. 

Reiner said, “You’re not going to-!”

With an eerie smile, their captain transformed. There was a crack of lightning, and the shaggy form of the Beast Titan soon towered over them.

Reiner looked shocked and angry. “Really? After what she did to save him? To save _Marley’s greatest weapon?”_

Bertholdt cried out, “No, Zeke!”

Golden eyes stared down at them. _We can’t make an exception for her. The Marleyan people cannot learn that there are good Eldians._

“Our mission cannot be compromised,” boomed the Beast Titan.

Then the ape gave an ear-shattering shriek.

The girl’s insides lurched, and she had a sudden, overwhelming sense of malaise. Like something horrible was about to happen.

_Why are they staring at me like that?_

There was a flash that left ringing in her ears and purple lights in her vision, then she was thrown forward onto the grass.

In the split second of the lightning crash, her eyes spotted a flower growing between some rocks. _That's beautiful,_ she thought absentmindedly. Then the ground suddenly pulsed beneath her, retreating far away, and the flower was no longer visible. 

Her body felt strange; the proportions her brain was used to weren’t there. Her chest and everything else felt heavy, cumbersome, yet oddly light.

Then all at once, she wasn't aware that anything had changed.

There was only the need to rend and tear. To eat.

Bertholdt stared in horror. The naked Titan was doubled over on the field. Its toothy jaws extended out grotesquely. Its arms and legs were too long and too short, the proportions of the torso all wrong and baby-soft. A horrifying parody of the human form. Her…_its_…face bore a stare of desperation. 

_D-Don’t anthropomorphize it,_ Bertholdt urged himself, _It’s just a pure Titan, it can’t feel anymore…_

The one thing that hadn’t changed was the hair. It had her same pretty hair, the hair he’d caressed just before she woke up this morning…

He imagined holding her close now, this man-eating monster, and shuddered in revulsion. _She...she's gone..._

The creature rose to a height of ten meters and immediately began a shambling run towards them.

Bertholdt was frozen in disbelief.

“RUN!” cried Reiner.

The lanky man scrambled as the Titan swung its arm towards him. 

Reiner glanced at Zeke in alarm, but the ape just smiled and shook his head. _I’m going to teach him a lesson. _

Bertholdt’s foot caught the side of the tent in his frantic attempt to run past it, causing him to trip and fall. When the pure Titan grabbed him, he screamed like a man on fire. 

He'd seen this scene before. Always with the same ending. As Bertholdt shrieked, the Titan brought him ravenously towards its mouth, and then…

The attack paused. 

Zeke had put his hand up. As the Beast Titan, he had not only the ability to create Pure Titans, but to control them. 

He said in a deep bass, “You see what these devils really are.”

The lanky man squirmed in the Titan’s grip, staring up at it in terror.

The Titan couldn’t move, but its urges continued: 

_EAT! CHEW AND EAT!_

Zeke popped out from the Beast Titan’s neck to personally berate his protégé. 

He strolled down its hairy arm. “You’re a coward, Bertholdt. You’ve always been weak. But now it seems you’ve forgotten who the enemy is.”

_“D-Don’t let it kill me!”_ Bertholdt panicked.

“Would I really let our Colossal Titan get eaten?” Zeke scoffed. “Of course not. Use your common sense.”

Reiner watched silently, seething. He was their captain, so they had to respect him, but what he had just done was terrible.

“Take a good look,” Zeke continued. “This is who everyone on this island really is.”

Bertholdt finally broke. He shouted, “How dare you! _How dare you do this to her! She was no threat to us!”_

Zeke’s facial expression didn’t change. He commanded the pure Titan without a word, and its arm jerked down slowly, reluctantly, to release its prey upon the ground.

“Fuck you,” Bertholdt said to the captain, tears trickling from his eyes.

He walked twenty feet back to the tent in an icy rage, his legs shaking. He stood next to the sink, clenching and unclenching his fists, nearly mad with despair and frustration.

Zeke walked through the tent door. Reiner entered behind him, carrying something. 

The long-haired man said to Bertholdt, “You’d do best to forget any of this ever happ-“

Reiner slammed the frying pan into the back of Zeke’s head. It hit with incredible force. 

The bespectacled blond stopped mid-stride, and his eyelids closed slowly, as if he was musing on something. Blood began to seep from his hair. Then he descended like a cut tree.

Reiner and Bertholdt stared at their fallen captain. They both thought, _Did that really just happen?_

Just as Zeke’s consciousness expired, so did his hold on the Pure Titan.

With nothing left to impede its instincts, it lurched forward. Reiner scrambled into the tent as the Titan reached inside. He drew his knife, ready for metamorphosis. But just before Reiner could slash his arm and turn into the Armored Titan, the girl’s Titan tore the tent out of the ground and shook it. 

Reiner, Bertholdt, and most of the tent's contents fell on the grass.

They stared as the empty tent was thrown fifty feet away.

Unobstructed, the Pure Titan grabbed Zeke’s unconscious form. His shaggy blond hair rustled as the creature’s rough hands brought him towards its mouth.

If Reiner hadn’t seen this sort of thing before, he might have screamed.

Zeke was not awake – fortunately for him – and couldn’t see his demise approaching. _ He might actually be dead already,_ Reiner thought. _ I hit him pretty hard. _

All Bertholdt could think was _oh shit._

There were no shouts or shrieks or pleas for mercy. As the hulking jaws closed around Zeke’s midsection, there was simply a bone-shattering CRUNCH.

Blood sprayed in heavy spurts. 

Then the girl’s Pure Titan swallowed, sending Zeke straight to hell.

Reiner watched all this in disbelief; Bertholdt’s mouth was hanging open.

Pieck, the Cart Titan, took another step backwards.

The Pure Titan turned. Its eyes now lit on Reiner. Just as it took a step, the shifter chemicals in Zeke’s spinal fluid hit the pure Titan’s bloodstream. The creature staggered, attempting without success to continue its attack, then crumpled. As it fell, it crushed two cots, the sink, and the coffee percolator.

As the other three Warriors tried to process what had just happened, the Pure Titan’s body began to disintegrate. Muscles, sinew, skin and bone all went up in steam. 

The girl’s unconscious form appeared at its nape.

Bertholdt was hyperventilating. His body coursed with adrenaline from the intensity of the last few minutes. 

Reiner walked up and put a hand on the girl. Then he glanced at Bertholdt and, not wanting to intrude on whatever was going on between them, took his hand off and started speaking to her instead. “Hey…are you alright? Actually, Bert, maybe we should let her sleep-“ 

Bertholdt sprang up and knelt at the girl’s side. 

He gasped out, “Are you okay?”

The Cart Titan cantered up to them.

The girl woke. Her voice was dazed. “Where?”

Bertholdt threw his arms around her, feeling a surge of relief and protectiveness. 

“Bertholdt?” she said softly.

He smiled at her. “It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

On a whim, he leaned in and kissed her. As she returned the kiss, electricity crackled through her body. 

Bertholdt's arms went around her and squeezed her close. 

Reiner's eyebrows went up. He turned away.

When the kiss was done, the girl looked at Bertholdt and smiled. “Why are you so nervous?”

Bertholdt was bright red. He laughed a little, then deadpanned, “Personality trait, I guess.”

“Wow, Bert!” Reiner said, facepalming. “Wow.” He looked at the girl. “A couple minutes ago, Zeke used his Beast scream to turn you into a Titan. It scared the shit out of us.”

“Oh my God,” she said. She glanced quickly at her body.

“It’s alright,” Bertholdt said with a smile. “You’re not one anymore.” 

_Oh. Of course._

Reiner said, “Then you..” _Tried to eat Bertholdt. No, I’d better not tell her that. She’s freaked out enough._ “Zeke told us to forget what just happened. That he’d only had to tie up loose ends. That’s when I knocked the bastard upside the head with a frying pan – “

The girl’s eyes suddenly widened.

“And…you picked Zeke up and ate him,” Bertholdt finished.

Though she’d figured that out, it still shocking to hear out loud. “I ATE Zeke?”

Bertholdt nodded solemnly. “Or, rather, your Titan did.”

“Ugh...” She held her head, feeling horrified and a little grossed out.

“It’s okay, you couldn’t help it,” Bertholdt said. “You weren’t you at the time.”

“Every one of us has eaten somebody when we were a Titan,” Reiner added.

"We're not proud of it," said Bertholdt. "But it happened."

There was a pause. 

“Did...did he suffer?” she asked.

“No," Reiner said, "I knocked him out, remember?”

Well, at least there was that. 

The girl knew she shouldn’t feel bad for him. Zeke HAD meant to turn her into a Pure Titan and leave her on the island, basically the equivalent of killing her. But getting eaten by a Titan was gruesome. Horrible.

_At least he’d been unconscious before he got ripped apart…_

"I'm just glad you're okay," Bertholdt said. 

They sat in silence for several seconds, pondering what they'd done. _Zeke's gone now,_ Bertholdt thought, _and we're responsible..._

Reiner said what they were all thinking. 

“As justified as it was…we basically murdered a Warrior. And Marleyan police are no joke."

"Is Marley the place you come from?" the girl asked.

“Yes," Bertholdt said. "The Marleyans sent us on this mission. Anyway, like Reiner was implying, it’s probably time we get our stories straight."

Reiner stared at the Cart Titan. “You too, Pieck.”

The Titan nodded with its massive, duck-like head.

Since no one had been able to communicate with the mainland after Shiganshima, the four Shifters concocted a story about how Zeke had fallen in battle.

They’d refine the details later, but for now it seemed plausible.

The girl couldn’t believe it. “This is crazy. I’m the new Beast Titan.”

Reiner and Bertholdt nodded their heads. They shared a serious look.

“We’ll…need to talk more about this later,” Bertholdt told the girl. "What it means.”

“Yeah, this kinda threw a wrench into our mission,” said Reiner.

The other Titan Shifters decided to change gears in the conversation.

“Do you remember anything from your couple of minutes as a Pure Titan?” Bertholdt asked her.

“Barely. I have this vague memory of the urge to eat people. Like when your neighbor’s cooking potato stew and it smells so good, you start to crave it.”

Bertholdt and Reiner both said, “That sounds like something Sasha would say.” They looked at each other and chuckled, remembering their potato-loving comrade from the Survey Corps.

The girl exclaimed, "It does!"

Bertholdt looked at his companion. She seemed to be alright, at least for now. He glanced at Reiner. He had to be as shaken about what they’d done to Zeke as Bertholdt was, even if he didn’t verbalize it.

“What did he taste like?” Reiner joked. “And did you have to pick any long hairs out of your teeth?”

The girl made a face. 

“You’re terrible,” Bertholdt said, punching him in the shoulder.

_“Jeez,_ Reiner,” the girl said. It was horrible, but she couldn’t help cracking a smile.

The Cart Titan made a strange, guttural gasping-dog noise.

The girl turned in surprise.

“Titans can laugh?” she asked.

“Creepily,” said Reiner. He said to the quadrupedal Titan, “Pieck, are you going to get out of that thing and say hi to our new friend?”

The creature slowly shook its head. 

“That figures,” Reiner remarked. 

“Don’t take it personally,” said Bertholdt. “She doesn’t really like being human anymore-she avoids it as much as possible.” 

_She?_

Bertholdt and Reiner told her more about the Cart Titan. It was surprising to learn that Pieck was 1. Female – the Survey Corps had been calling the Cart Titan “Duckman,” and 2. Someone who, even when human, preferred to be on all fours. Pieck was a nice person, they explained, if a bit eccentric.

Reiner said, “And before you say it, yes, she’s a girl. Despite Jean’s nickname for her.”

The girl looked embarrassed. She shook her head at Pieck, gesturing with her palms out. “N-No, I never assumed-“

Bertholdt whispered a little too loudly, “The whole Survey Corps did.”

The Cart Titan tilted its head at them and raised an eyebrow, as if offended. 

Reiner laughed heartily. The girl and Bertholdt soon joined in.

Reiner said, “It’s okay, we’re just joking with you. We love you, Pieck.”

All four of them enjoyed this moment of levity, trying to avoid the looming question – what on earth were they going to do next?


End file.
